A big bet on school facilities

Hi, it’s Kalyn Belsha from Chalkbeat’s national desk. As we head into the holiday weekend, I hope you’ll take some time to sit with a piece we published this week that looks at why many high-poverty schools spent a lot of COVID aid on facilities — and what that could mean for their students’ academic recovery.

Do you have a story to share about how pandemic money upgraded or built a school in your community? Drop me a line at [email protected]; I’m working on some follow-up reporting and would love to hear from you.

The big story

Pennsylvania’s New Kensington-Arnold School District made a big bet with its millions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds.

The suburban Pittsburgh district, where nearly every student is from a low-income family, invested nearly 80% of its last and largest aid package in facilities — essentially every dollar it was legally allowed to.?

Many high-poverty school districts across the country made a similar calculation, hoping those improvements would pay off for academics eventually, too. New research finds that high-poverty districts were more likely to budget a bigger share of their final aid allotment on facilities, especially on new construction and school repairs.

In New Kensington-Arnold schools, the spending improved classroom air ventilation, bought new furniture, and converted an unused planetarium into a “brain space” where kids work on projects.

“To see that people are putting money into it, and that there is value in this building and what we’re doing, I think is really important for our kids,” said eighth grade teacher Erika Felack-Bucci. “For a long time, that was ignored.”

Still, some worry that because high-poverty districts invested more COVID aid in their buildings, they had less to spend on academic recovery, even though they educate the kids who have the most learning to make up.

Read the full story here.

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Also from the national desk

They weren’t yet in school when COVID hit, but the pandemic still set America’s youngest students back. Many young children are not making the same kind of academic progress that their counterparts did in reading and math prior to the pandemic , and some are falling farther behind, a new report from Curriculum Associates found. The group’s data suggests that some schools should focus academic interventions on early elementary schoolers.

Local stories to watch

• A greater share of younger children are reading on grade level in Denver after the district switched its curriculum. But many are still testing below pre-pandemic levels — a vexing outcome the district aims to address with a new intervention program for struggling students.
• Indiana’s revamped reading retention law will likely have the greatest effects on kids from low-income families. The new law will require struggling readers to get extra literacy help starting next summer, but it’s unclear if state lawmakers will give schools more money to help pay for that. “In order to move the needle on retention, we need to talk about poverty and transportation and healthy foods,” said one advocate for Indiana youth. “It’s all intertwined.”
• This Colorado district started a new summer school program to help its many new immigrant students. The Westminster Public Schools program helps Spanish-speaking students continue to practice their English, and offers free transportation and meals, too. Lessons often focus on topics like food, money, and seasons that kids can start using right away.